Parenting has always lived somewhere between order and chaos. For decades, the standard approach leaned heavily on “because I said so.”

Lately, though, parents are experimenting with something closer to improv: Yes Day parenting.

The premise is simple. For one day, parents agree to stop saying “no.”

Kids make the decisions (within reason), and adults surrender control.

The idea is framed as a positive parenting strategy—one that builds trust, encourages child autonomy, and gives families a break from the daily grind. Of course, it can also go off the rails in spectacular fashion.

There are many ways to ruin a perfectly decent marriage. You can wage war over the thermostat. You can introduce your in-laws into every minor decision.

Or—you can take the quietest path to utter relational ruin: keep score.

I drove to your cousin’s wedding, so you’d better drive to mine.
I folded the laundry—so you owe me sex.

This is quid pro quo marriage, America’s favorite pastime. We like to call it fairness. But the truth? It feels less like love and more like an audit.

And the evidence is in: marriages run like ledgers don’t just feel brittle—they decline over time.

We’ve all been sold the same relationship fantasy: keep it fresh, keep it fiery, keep it Instagrammable.

Surprise trips to Paris! Elaborate gender reveals! Interplanetary vacations that require a second mortgage!

But ask anyone who’s sat across from me in couples therapy, and they’ll tell you—novelty, while highly valued, can’t hold a marriage together all on it’s own.

What actually saves relationships is something far less flashy and far more human: Nemorinity.

Nemorinity is the “pleasant un-surprise.”

It’s the relief of finding your partner in the exact place you expected them, doing the exact thing you hoped for. It’s the familiar casserole on the table, the Saturday morning coffee handed over without comment, the sarcastic sibling banter that somehow refuses to die.

It’s not boring. It’s oxygen.

Forget the picket fence. Forget Dad in a tie and Mom with Jell-O salad.

In 2025, family values look more like this: Dad squeezing in Instacart runs between shifts, Mom livestreaming about “soft life energy,” and the kids eating cereal for dinner because nobody had time to defrost the chicken.

The American family hasn’t disappeared—it’s just patchworked together, endlessly adapting, and somehow still standing. Call it resilience. Call it survival with a Wi-Fi bill.

For decades, people spoke of marriage the way you talk about a tired shopping mall: once bustling, now half empty, and destined to be bulldozed for condos.

The divorce boom, the rise of cohabitation, the endless reinvention of family life—all pointed toward matrimony as a quaint relic.

And yet, as The Atlantic (2025) points out, the thing refuses to die.

Divorce rates are falling, and more children are growing up in two-parent households.

In an era where trust in institutions is at an all-time low, marriage is the one that keeps limping along, like a stubborn houseplant no one remembered to water—but which somehow thrives anyway.

Picture this: a couple at the kitchen table, not clinking wine glasses but glaring at a Trader Joe’s receipt.

One of them swears almond butter used to be $5.99; the other insists it was always $7.49. Both are wrong, of course, but accuracy is irrelevant.

The real story is that this isn’t a marriage—it’s a budget committee meeting with unpaid overtime and no snacks.

The American Family Survey just confirmed what that receipt already knew: money stress is now the gravitational center of American family life (Deseret News & Brigham Young University, 2025).

Everyone swears the past doesn’t matter in love.

But sit through a family wedding and watch how Aunt Linda side-eyes Cousin Derek’s fiancée number three, and you’ll see how quickly history gets dragged into the room.

A new cross-cultural study in Scientific Reports confirms this: people judge potential long-term partners less favorably if they’ve racked up a high “body count.”

And here’s the kicker: despite all the cultural noise about double standards, men and women judge each other’s sexual pasts almost identically.

Here’s the joke: the people worst at spotting bullshit are the ones most convinced they’re brilliant at it.

That’s not cynicism—it’s cognitive science, confirmed by a 2025 study in Thinking & Reasoning (Čavojová, Šrol, & Brezina, 2025).

What Is Bullshit Detection?

In psychology, bullshit isn’t just a swear word.

It’s communication designed to impress or persuade without concern for truth (Frankfurt, 2005).

Philosopher G.A. Cohen (2002) added that true bullshit is “unclarifiable”—it sounds profound but evaporates when you try to pin it down.

Think of lines like:

• “Imagination is inside exponential space-time events.” (nonsense)

• “A river cuts through rock, not because of its power but its persistence.” (sense)

Spotting the difference is bullshit detection. And it’s harder than it looks.

A fresh slice of bad news, courtesy of Psychology of Women Quarterly: women who spend more time turning themselves into walking billboards—self-objectifying, in the polite academic term—tend to have lower empathy.

Not only the soft kind (emotional warmth), but the cognitive kind too (the ability to imagine someone else’s point of view).

Apparently, it’s hard to see other people’s humanity when you’re busy policing your own thighs.

Researchers Gian Antonio Di Bernardo and colleagues studied hundreds of Italian women and kept finding the same pattern: the more women self-objectified, the more likely they were to self-dehumanize.

Yes, you heard that right—strip themselves of their own humanity. And when you start seeing yourself as a mannequin in need of upkeep, it becomes harder to imagine that other people have thoughts, feelings, or goals that differ from yours.

The Old Testament gave the world a magnificent notion: every human being is made in the image of God.

Not just our own, not just the strong, not just the politically convenient—but everyone. Genesis 1:27 does not hedge or qualify: “So God created humankind in his image.”

If that is true, then the life of a child in Gaza carries the same divine imprint as the life of a child in Tel Aviv, New York, or London. To look away from that truth is to betray it.

The Ten Commandments were not carved on stone tablets to be admired in museums. They were a demand: do not kill, do not steal, honor your family, protect life.

These words became the bedrock of Western law. To destroy neighborhoods where children live and excuse their deaths as “collateral damage” is to burn those commandments in real time.

The prophets sharpened the message. They thundered against kings and priests who forgot their covenant, insisting that justice is measured by how a people treats the vulnerable.

“Seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow” (Isaiah 1:17).

“Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (Amos 5:24). There is no way to honor these words and remain indifferent to Gaza’s children.

We live in an age that worships efficiency. Groceries arrive with a swipe, the rent pays itself, and a cheerful kiosk replaces the receptionist. Faster, cheaper, tidier.

But as ad man Rory Sutherland likes to point out, efficiency often blinds us to meaning.

He calls it the Doorman Fallacy: the belief that a doorman’s only job is to open a door.

By that logic, you can replace him with an automatic sliding door and call it progress.

Except the sliding door doesn’t greet you, reassure you, or lend the building its sense of dignity. The doorman wasn’t just functional—he was symbolic.

Couples fall into the same trap at home. They reduce each other to jobs: provider, scheduler, housekeeper, sexual partner. Then they wonder why the marriage feels more like an airport concourse than a relationship.

Amsterdam: city of canals, tulips, and recently a thousand folks explaining how to monetize their genitals in the gig economy.

Europe’s largest pornography conference took over a riverside hotel, which is ordinarily the sort of place where German capitalists meet to discuss their supply chains.

Last week, however, it was flooded with roller skates, sequined bras, and the relentless optimism of people who believe burnout can be solved with branding.

Out in the lobby, two buses of American retirees clutched their tickets for the cheese-and-windmill tour.

They looked on in horror as women in diamanté heels rolled past with ring lights. The retirees will, most likely, never recover.